Quartet

Quartet began life as a Sega arcade machine in 1986; what we have here is the later Commodore 64 version. In the arcade it was one of the first cabinets where four people could share the same run-and-gun platformer at once, hence the name. You pick one of four characters, each with a weapon upgradeable through three levels, and shoot your way to a boss who leaves behind the key to the next stage's door.

The clever part of the original is how it handles space and cooperation. A jetpack lets you move vertically, crouching gets you through narrow passages, and a partner can serve as a step up to places you cannot reach alone. Instead of lives there is an energy meter that drains whenever an enemy touches you, so the game is about attrition rather than about one fatal missed jump.

The Commodore 64 conversion is, unfortunately, the weakest thing the series produced. David Whittaker's music is excellent and carries over practically the whole soundtrack, but the sound effects are drab. The bigger problem is play: characters look blocky, animation is sloppy, only a handful of enemies fit on screen at once and those move slowly. Crouch-walking is missing entirely and the level design was reworked around its absence. What remains is a two-player game noticeably easier than the arcade, and with the difficulty went most of the point.

You are left with a decent twenty-minute two-player shooter and one of the few ways to sample on an 8-bit machine what Quartet was about in the arcade. Just expect an echo of the original rather than a full conversion.

Quartet starts on oldgame.cz directly in the browser, with no emulator to install.